The ratio of job openings to applicants is now higher than it was at the top of the last boom in 2007 by a substantial margin. Hours worked have surged. The labour market is tightening hard. Unless Americans have gone through a Puritan conversion, their swelling disposable income must soon start flowing into the shopping malls.

What people have stopped doing is referring to the post 2009 “recovery” as a “depression” (intimately called Bernanke-induced “little depression”). And the job opening picture is not at all inconsistent with that, which is well described in the chart below.